Matt Curry has a new post to his blog listing a few ways that you can help get the most out of your CakePHP application's performance.

It's a not so well kept secret that CakePHP is slow. What isn't well know is that this is done by design. I could get in a lot of trouble by revealing this, but I'm willing to take that risk. [...] Every time you use one of the tips in this article it's one less gold chain on the neck of a Cake developer.

Here's his list of eight tips:

Set Debug to 0

Cache your slow queries/web service requests/whatever

View Caching

HTML Caching

APC (or some other opcode cache)

Persistent Models

Store The Persistent Cache in APC

Speed Up Reverse Routing

Some of the tips are CakePHP specific, but several of them (the caching) can be useful no matter what sort of application you're using - framework or not.

This is just a quick update for Dessert #6 - MySql & UTF-8. I've been using the approach outlined in that old post pretty much until today, when I realized that it has two major flaws: It does not work when using multiple db connections (i.e. using load balancing or connecting to a 3rd party db), and it might interfere with other databases that don't need this utf8 thing to be set.

He includes some code (a quick 13 liner) to take care of this small issue. Check out the comments on the post for an even easier way too.

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Matthew Weir O'Phinney had the chance to present the Zend Framework during a meeting he attended of his local PHP user group (BostonPHP) as a part of a series their doing.

Horde was also represented as part of the evening's fare. It was the first time I've attended a UG, so I got the double whammy of that and being a presenter. Oh, make it a triple whammy -- Boston is a 3+ hour drive from the Burlington, VT area I now call home.

He mentions a talk that Chuck Hagenbuch (of the Horde project) gave on the current state of the project and a bit about his presentation (including some portions that pointed out problems with the Zend_Db component). You can check out this and the rest of the contents of his presentation here [pdf] and here [mp3 podcast].